Top of the Hill Festival Daly City 2026: Why the Event Keeps Growing

"A critical piece to encouraging efforts to revitalize a community is through placemaking, community engagement, and bringing attention to the long-standing commercial neighborhood that is already there." That line doesn't come from a festival flyer. It comes from a San Mateo County Board memo asking supervisors to approve up to $75,000 for the third annual Top of the Hill Festival on Saturday, October 17, 2026.

Underneath the music lineup, that is what the festival is for. The street fair at Mission Street and John Daly Boulevard is the main public tool Daly City and the County are using to bring people back to the northern end of the Mission Street corridor. Each year the footprint grows to send more of those people past the brick-and-mortar businesses that line the street the other 364 days. If you live within walking distance, the details of this year's layout matter more than the headliners.

A street fair with a job description

The County memo calls the festival "an economic activation event for small businesses in the northern segment of the Mission Street Corridor, known as the Top of the Hill neighborhood." It also explains why a street fair is doing this work at all. The city once had a Redevelopment Area for the corridor, and the State of California dissolved it in 2011. The most recent city action is a rezoning of the corridor to Commercial Mixed-Use, which the memo says streamlines higher-density development.

Zoning sets what can be built over the next decade. It doesn't put anyone on the sidewalk this fall. The festival covers that gap. The memo credits Measure K funds with backing the first two years and calls them "a critical funding source" for the event, and the 2026 money is a request for supervisors to authorize. The memo says plainly what it expects from the crowd: attendees "patronize nearby restaurants, retail establishments, and service providers before, during, and after the event."

The City's release notes that the County and District 5 Supervisor David J. Canepa are Platinum Sponsors for the third year in a row. The City also hired Comcast for a TV and streaming ad campaign running August 24 through October 16, 2026, across the Mid-Peninsula and South Peninsula markets. That puts paid advertising aimed at people in San Mateo and farther south, with the explicit goal of getting them to spend money on Mission Street.

Three years of crowd growth

The numbers below are the City's and County's own figures from the grant memo, not an independent count. Even so, they show how fast the event has grown.

Attendance doubled between the first and second year. The 2026 projection is two and a half times last year's count. The memo also reports that in 2025 "almost every participating food vendor sold out." When the vendors run out of food before the crowd runs out of appetite, the people still hungry walk into the restaurants along the street. That overflow into existing businesses is exactly the outcome the memo describes.

The 2026 lineup leans regional. J Boog, The Stylistics, Digital Underground and Kamaiyah share the bill with Good Time Collective, The Best Intentions, and DJ Shortkut, who is Daly City's 2026 Hip Hop Hall of Fame inductee. Franco Finn and Marcus D & Taylor from the Star 101.3 Morning Show are emceeing, with BigBody Cisco also featured.

What the bigger footprint adds this year

The most useful change for residents is the second stage. The Main Stage stays at Mission Street and John Daly Boulevard. A new Community Stage at Mission Street and Evergreen Avenue will feature local and regional performers. With two stages, the crowd moves along Mission Street between the two intersections instead of packing in around one. The storefronts on that stretch are the ones the grant is meant to help.

Here is what else the County memo lists for 2026:

• A Sensory Zone, new this year, set up as a quiet space for attendees with sensory sensitivities and other special needs.
• A certified farmers market with produce from San Mateo County growers.
• Free medical screenings and vaccinations from the AHMC Seton Mobile Clinic, plus onsite Medi-Cal enrollment through San Mateo County Health's Health Coverage Unit.
• Several Kids Zones across the footprint, with a Hoop Bus, dunk tank, bounce house, balloon artist and face painting.
• A Vendor Market on Mission Street that gives first priority to Daly City businesses, then opens to neighboring cities. Food trucks and booths follow the same order.
• Resource tables from groups including the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center, Felton Institute, CORA and the San Mateo County Department of Sustainability.
• A car show, which the City's release lists among the special attractions.

The Vendor Market's local-first rule matches the memo's stated goal. A Daly City maker who gets a booth meets customers from across the region on the maker's own street.

The storefronts inside the footprint

The Daly City History Museum is the clearest example of a permanent business benefiting from the festival. It occupies the former John Daly Library at 6351 Mission St. The County memo places the Daly City History Guild & Museum "in the center of the Festival footprint" and says it has had its largest number of visitors during the event. The museum's regular visiting hours are on Saturdays. Festival day is a Saturday when the visitors come straight to its door.

The biggest change to the street this year is a few doors up. Grocery Outlet opened on September 10, 2026, at 6100 Mission St., in the space Walgreens left in 2024 after two decades. The Daly City Colma Chamber of Commerce welcomed the store on opening day. SFGATE reported that David and Carla Gates own the store independently. The store is 13,905 square feet, and it opened in a year when the chain had announced 36 store closures elsewhere. A large retail space that had sat empty since 2024 is open again, five weeks before the event's biggest crowd so far.

Other anchors nearby:

• Centennial Plaza, at the northwest corner of Mission and John Daly, came out of the city's earlier Mission Street improvement project. That project also added the medians, pedestrian lighting, bulb-outs and wider sidewalks between John Daly Boulevard and Parkview Avenue.
• Nick & Nora Bar lists its address as 6282 Mission St. on its own website.
• ZON ZON, farther south at 6819 Mission St., had its soft opening on April 20, 2026, serving boba and sandwiches. The Chamber named owners Jacqueline, Tommy and Tieu.

Getting there when 50,000 people are expected

The County memo says parking in the neighborhood is limited. It encourages public transit or rideshare, points to the nearby Daly City BART station, and says Clipper will offer onsite help with its mobile app. The City is also promoting the event with BARTable and SamTrans.

No 2026 street-closure map had been published at the time of writing. Last year's closure gives a sense of the scale. For the October 18, 2025 festival, SFMTA closed Mission Street between San Jose Avenue and John Daly Boulevard from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and rerouted Muni's 14R and 58 lines. SFMTA marks that notice as archived content, so treat it as a reference point rather than this year's plan. If you rely on those routes or regularly drive Mission on a Saturday, watch for this year's notice. With a second stage at Evergreen, it's reasonable to expect the 2026 footprint to be larger.

What comes after October 17

The festival is the short-term piece of a longer plan, and the longer pieces are moving more slowly. On April 27, 2026, the Daly City City Council agenda included an item supporting a Transportation Development Act grant application for a John Daly Boulevard pedestrian-and-bicycle project. That is an application, not funded construction. It builds on a corridor idea the city first described in 2016: linking Daly City BART and De Long Street to the Top of the Hill SamTrans hub.

On zoning, the city's 2023 Commercial Mixed-Use proposal for Mission Street and Geneva Avenue allowed residential use under objective design standards, with proposed building heights from 30 to 120 feet. No specific project at the festival intersection has been approved under that zoning in the records reviewed for this post. For now, the plan for this stretch of Mission Street rests on one Saturday a year, a requested grant of up to $75,000, and the businesses already open. The festival runs Saturday, October 17, from noon to 6 p.m. at Mission Street and John Daly Boulevard, and admission is free.

Corridor rezoning, a reopened anchor store and a festival growing into a regional draw all shape how buyers see the blocks around Top of the Hill. If you own a home near Mission Street and want to know how the corridor's changes affect your property's value, Wang Tang Group offers consultations in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Request a free home valuation and we'll walk you through what the numbers show for your block.